My eldest daughter left home a few years ago and now, at 15, my youngest will quite possibly be heading the same way soon. (Although she is still just about at the stage where she is convinced she is never going to want to leave me.)

I’ve been a parent since I was 17, so part of me is pretty daunted by the idea of suddenly not being responsible for at least one other human being on a day-to-day basis.

Since the age of four, my life has been shaped by the rhythms of school – my own and my kids’ – and the prospect of not having to live by the 9-3 day and school holiday schedule is almost unfathomable.

While I’m naturally anxious, I do want to stay positive about it.

Being alone after all this time could open up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and there are definitely some things that I won’t miss about having a teenager at home.

Here are five of them:

I won’t miss packed lunches

And here I mean every aspect of them – thinking about them, shopping for them, making them and then, perhaps the most demoralising part of all, throwing half of them away at the end of every day.

You’d think at the age of 15 that this wouldn’t still be a thing, but then I had the mouldy sandwich incident and suddenly it was all very real.

(Picture: Getty)

I won’t miss having to ‘do hair’

I’ve never been any good at doing other people’s hair, and I was in my thirties before my youngest daughter made me sit down one day and watch YouTube videos until I could do a decent French plait.

What I especially don’t like about it is that you can be ready to leave the house, and then it’s suddenly ‘can you just do my hair?’

I won’t miss teenage grumpiness

‘I wasn’t stamping up the stairs,’ my teenager will shout at me sometimes, when I’ve just asked her not to stamp, (which she definitely was doing).

‘I was just walking carefully. Do you want me to fall down the stairs? Shall I tiptoe?’ she’ll ask furiously, ‘so as not to disturb you?’